The reeds of the Sinking Fen rose twelve feet out of the stagnant black water, their feathery plumes rustling in the midnight wind like the whisper of dead armies.
Three heavy flat-bottomed timber barges drifted along the forgotten canal, pushed forward not by noisy oars, but by long ash poles wielded by Kaelen’s seasoned scouts. The gunwales rode barely three inches above the scum, loaded with sixty dismounted spearmen and forty archers, their boiled-leather brigandines darkened with river mud and their iron mail wrapped in strips of greased wool to silence any clatter.
On the lead barge, Aurelia knelt at the bow, her palms hovering an inch above the black surface of the water.
The silver glyphs on her skin cast a pale, cold sheen across the lilies and peat moss. Through the ancient water-conduits beneath the fen, she could feel the pulse of the Sunken Spire. It sat two miles ahead, a towering monolith of obsidian and black basalt half-swallowed by the marsh, radiating a repulsive, unnatural heat—the searing, sanctimonious energy of the Solar Concord’s holy pyres, forced down into the deep earth to burn away the ancient seals.
Behind her, the solid weight of Malakor stepped to the gunwale.
The barge dipped slightly beneath his bulk, but his balance was effortless. He wore his blackened chain cuirass, stripped of the heavy shoulder plates to give his arms unhindered range, his great sword latched flat across his spine. He looked like an abyssal beast rising from the muck to claim the surface world.
He reached down, his broad, calloused hand settling onto the nape of her neck, his thumb finding the sensitive hollow below her ear. The sovereign fire in his touch was a sharp, searing contrast to the freezing river vapor, cutting through the chill that clung to her limbs.
"You feel them?" Malakor murmured, his deep rumble vibrating against her skull.
"The battle-priests are chanting," Aurelia answered softly, her eyes opening, the irises burning with pure quicksilver. "They are burning solar oil into the drainage vaults to boil the abyssal water. They think they can scorch the Veil’s shadow out of the stone."
"They will learn that fire answers to the hearth, not the priest," Malakor said, his amber eyes narrowing toward the southern gloom where the dark silhouette of the Spire began to pierce the fog.
Above the tree line, the night sky was stained a sickly, sulfurous yellow from the pyres burning on the surface bastions. The dull, distant rumble of catapult stones and the clatter of drums signaled that Kaelen’s main host had begun their diversionary assault on the northern causeway, drawing the Inquisitor’s vanguard toward the outer palisades.
The lead barge glided through an arch of weeping willow branches, emerging into the shadow of a colossal submerged colonnade.
The ancient sluice gate of the Spire loomed before them—a massive grate of green-corroded bronze bars half-buried in river silt. Beyond the bars, an arched drainage flume swallowed the black water into the dark heart of the lower crypts.
"The grate is locked with solar wards," Varek hissed from the center of the barge, his recurve bow gripped tight in his fist. "Touch that bronze, and the holy runes will set the water on fire."
"Then we will let the water freeze," Aurelia said, rising to her feet on the narrow bow.
She did not draw her steel. She extended both hands toward the bronze grate, her fingers curling into claws as she tapped into the raw, unyielding void of the Veil.
A pale, frigid wind whipped through the reeds, smelling of ancient frost and tomb-dust. The black water around the barge turned instantly to slush, then froze into thick, milky-white ice that groaned against the hull. The radiant golden runes etched into the bronze gate flickered, turned brittle gray, and shattered like sugar crystals under the crushing thermodynamic shock.
Malakor stepped forward. Without waiting for the ice to settle, he drove his heavy iron boot straight into the center of the frosted bronze bars.
With a deafening crack that sounded like an iron bell snapping in half, the three-hundred-year-old gate sheared from its stone footings and crashed into the flume.
Malakor turned, caught Aurelia by the waist with one arm, and vaulted cleanly over the shattered threshold onto the stone landing inside the crypt.
He didn't release her immediately. He pinned her briefly against the slime-slick basalt wall, his gaze molten and dark as his mouth found the curve of her throat in a fierce, stolen caress that made her gasp in the echoing gloom.
"Take the priests, Aurelia," he whispered against her ear, his breath hot and ragged with impending slaughter. "Leave the Inquisitor for me."
She shoved lightly against his chest, her daggers leaping into her palms with a dry snick of steel. "Don't take all night, my Lord."
Together, followed by a hundred shadows from the barges, they plunged into the belly of the Spire.